The Boleyn Bride Page 16

  “Who wants to appear as everyone else?” she would laugh whenever anyone questioned the choices she made, arching an elegant, plucked black brow. “I please myself; if others are pleased as well”—she shrugged—“so be it.”

  Many thought her a heartless creature who cared for nothing and no one but herself. But that was not true; there was one she loved more than any—her brother George. From the moment she returned, he was at her side and rarely left it. I don’t know how they did it, but they could say more to each other with a look than most people could in whole reams of words. It was uncanny the way they could read each other’s minds and finish each other’s sentences. They joked that they were twins, only Anne had arrived fashionably late, a year after George, who had gone ahead to prepare the way for her; words that would come back to haunt me at the end of their lives when they took on an even more poignant meaning when George would again go first.

  Together, they gathered around them a close set of friends, a clever little band of wits and poets, all happy-go-lucky and devil-may-care. Closest of all were the flamboyant red-haired Sir Francis Weston; tall, dark, and handsome Sir William Brereton, who at first sight seemed awfully staid and serious, the calm voice of reason until you got to know him better; and baby-faced blond Sir Henry Norris, a man many thought too gentle and endowed with too much heart to ever succeed at court, yet was amongst King Henry’s most intimate and highly favored body servants.

  In no time at all, the finest poet of the court, Sir Thomas Wyatt, was infatuated with Anne and composing sonnets by the score in tribute to her beauty, wit, and grace, declaring his love for her in every word just as John Skelton had done for me. But Anne only laughed, clicked her goblet against George’s, and declared, “It is good to be alive!”

  As for my golden girl, Mary would redeem herself in her father’s eyes when King Henry, always a one for a buxom and obliging blonde, took her into his bed after seeing her in a gown of silver that made her golden hair shine all the brighter. Thomas embraced her and called her “my darling” and magnanimously assured her “all is forgiven,” and paid for several beautiful silk and lace bed gowns and crystal vials of costly perfume to entice and excite King Henry. “An investment,” he said to me as he nodded approvingly over Mary’s selections.

  But Mary was too sweet-natured to ever make her fortune as a courtesan. Indeed, I think she would have failed as a ha’penny whore if she had been turned out to walk the streets of London. She asked for nothing and got it, declaring that she loved the King and lay with him as an expression of the great love she bore him. Even when her exasperated father threw up his hands and insisted, “Love is ephemeral. Assets are tangible,” Mary refused to use her position to barter for favors or fill the family’s money boxes.

  “Enjoy your time in the sun, daughter; it will be brief,” I told her in words cold and clipped and followed my husband out of her luxuriously appointed palace apartment with a secret passage discreetly connecting it to the King’s bedchamber so he need never be seen creeping down the corridor to visit her. I was glad of that paltry attempt at discretion. How it grieved me that my own daughter should be the one to cause Queen Catherine pain by embracing wholeheartedly what I had spurned out of loyalty, love, and marital spite.

  When they danced together, their desire for each other blatantly apparent, Queen Catherine, despite her pain, sought to comfort me. She took my hand and, gazing kindly into my eyes, said, “Do not blame yourself; I know it is not your fault, Elizabeth. You have always been a good and faithful friend to me. Your daughter is a sweet girl caught fast in the grip of love; she means me no harm. She will be the one who is hurt in the end, and for that, I am sorry. I pray for her each day.”

  In the end, Mary’s own tranquil, domestically inclined nature would be her undoing. She did not understand that the kings, and other great men, she bedded were not interested in her, that they came to her for sensual delights, not the bland and cozy domesticity of hearth and home. They wanted naughtiness, unabashed nakedness, pumice stone–smoothed bare limbs, not woolen stockings; a woman comfortable in her own skin who knew how to cast modesty aside as though she were a naked Eve for whom clothes didn’t exist and who wasn’t inclined to try on fig leaves; a mistress endowed with an adventurous, spicy sensuality and a zealous, zesty passion that wasn’t afraid to take chances, to experiment and play, to revel in hot sweaty lust, whisper dirty words, and perform daring deeds upon the satin sheets; a playful kitten who might at any moment unsheathe her claws; not a placid, proper lady sitting by the fire embroidering and inquiring, “How was your day, dear?” with amusing little anecdotes to tell about children and servants and tidbits of palace gossip. They wanted a tigress in a diamond collar, not a fireside tabby. But Mary’s mind never could grasp that. I broke it down for her in a simple equation that even the most mathematically inept should have been able to comprehend: Time + Familiarity = Boredom, but still understanding eluded poor Mary.

  When she became pregnant, King Henry lost all interest. I knew he would. He always did. If it would not have appeared in such bad taste—I was after all the mother of the mistress of the moment—I would even have cast a wager upon it along with the other court gamblers staking their coins on how long it would be before the King tired of Mary and changed partners again.

  It was just like when Bessie Blount conceived and the numerous times when Queen Catherine’s womb quickened. Henry simply was not attracted to breeding women. As much as he wanted children, to ensure his line lived on and provide Tudor heirs for England’s throne, his fastidious nature was repelled by the changes pregnancy wrought upon a woman’s body. And in truth, woman though I am, with all my vanity and pride, I could not blame him; I hated the gross transformation pregnancy wrought upon my beautiful body and the sagging and lined mementos it left behind. To my mind, it always seemed too great a price to pay for the miracle of creation.

  When the end came, it was swift. A little clinging, pleading, and tears, then it was done, and Mary meekly accepted her lot.

  She lacked the force of will to persuade the King to acknowledge her child as his own and amiably allowed herself to be married off to one of his courtiers, the kindly Sir William Carey, an Esquire of the Body, who would gladly give his name to the royal bastard growing in the warm nest of her belly. Luckily, he and Mary were well matched. A pair of golden heads and golden hearts, they were both too nice for the sphere they had been born to inhabit; you have to be ruthless and driven, shameless and willing to do anything, to smile and flatter those you hate or trample and disparage those you like or even love, if you want to succeed at court. You have to be callous and hard, and embrace or discard people heedless of personal feelings as the moment dictates, and not everyone can do that. For some of us it comes all too easy, but there are others who have a conscience that will not allow them to sleep at night if they do not heed its urgent and insistent pangs and the whispered warnings of the little voice inside.

  In pale pink and buttercup yellow watered silk, all embroidered with gold, with a wreath of gilded rosemary, marigolds, spicy pinks, and bright yellow gillyflowers crowning her wealth of golden ringlets, my daughter, the most beautiful bride of all, was married in the royal chapel at Greenwich Palace.

  As I watched, I wept and wished the King had seen fit to provide her with a worthier and wealthier husband. Though a sweet, kind man who clearly adored Mary, Will Carey could never give my golden girl the life I had envisioned for her.

  She smiled coyly as she became Sir William’s wife and dipped a little bunch of marigolds tied with pink and yellow ribbons into a gilt goblet filled with rosewater and nibbled at it daintily, then dipped and held it out for him to do the same. Marigolds dipped in rosewater were a popular aphrodisiac in those days, common and harmless unlike some of the more outlandish remedies made with rare and costly or deadly poisonous ingredients one must handle with the utmost care, and it had become fashionable to provide the bridal couple with posies of these quaint orange-go
ld flowers and cups of rosewater at all the best weddings.

  King Henry stood by, resplendent in purple velvet and cloth-of-gold, pearls and diamonds to represent majesty and wealth, not sorrow and tears, spangling his person. Throughout the ceremony he stood there pursing his lips and looking mildly annoyed; if my mother-in-law had been there doubtlessly she would have diagnosed a distress of the liver and been avid to dose him with some noxious brew containing basil and bat entrails. He was, I could tell, at war with himself—loath to relinquish a favorite mistress, though it was his own finicky fastidiousness that prevented him from keeping and enjoying her further.

  Mary had run straight to me, poor girl, expecting some comfort from her mother, bursting into my bedchamber in a flurry of weeping, rumpled blond curls, and gold satin, and blurted it all out between wracking sobs and showers of tears. Henry had just told her that they must, because of her condition, part. She confided that though she was well schooled in France in methods to safeguard against conception and had always used them successfully, something had gone wrong this time. The tea of tansy and white poplar had, for the first time, failed, and, for this, King Henry blamed her.

  “You should have been more careful,” he said. “I thought you sufficiently experienced in such matters and would know well how to avoid this.”

  My tenderhearted daughter, recalling how delighted King Henry had been when Bessie Blount gave him the son he longed for, had wept all the harder, unable to understand why this fruit of their love was so unwelcome. Why were she, and her baby, not as good as Bessie Blount and her boy? Why indeed? That was an answer that also eluded me.

  Poor Mary, she wept and wallowed and buried her face in my lap, leaving behind a smeared imprint of her features painted on my nightgown, before she slunk away, hurt and bewildered, wondering why her mother had failed to give her the comfort she had expected and so desperately needed.

  “There are other teas, daughter!” I called after her. “Some pennyroyal, perhaps mixed with . . .”

  Mary turned on my threshold, regarding me with wild-eyed horror, shaking her head uncomprehendingly, as though she could not believe those words had passed my lips. I wondered for a moment if she thought me ignorant of such methods. But no, it was horror, true, unadulterated horror I saw in Mary’s eyes.

  She stopped her ears, pressing the palms of her hands hard and tight over them, and fled from the same woman she had come running to hoping for some comfort and kindness.

  And what did I do? Did I run after her? Did I cringe beneath the incredulous amber eyes that regarded me as though I were some kind of monster? Did I try to counsel her or change her mind? Did I comfort, love, hold, and kiss her, and assure her that I, her mother, would love her no matter what? No. I did none of those things. I changed into a fresh nightgown, massaged a little rose-scented cream into my face to keep my skin supple and soft, blew out the candle, went to bed, and slept soundly.

  Once again, I had failed and disappointed a child I had brought into this world. I might say in my defense that I was preoccupied with my own grief, mourning my father. He had in failing health retired from the court, passing all his titles and posts on to his namesake and heir, my brother, Thomas Howard, and spent the last year of his life in the country, at Framlingham Castle in Surrey, jesting that he would spend the rest of his days tending his beehives and sending jars of his fine honey to all his acquaintances. He was in his eighty-second year when he perished. I was chief mourner at his funeral, one of the most expensive and extravagant England had ever seen, and walked, gowned in black velvet and long, trailing veils of diaphanous black, at the head of a procession of four hundred black-robed and hooded men bearing torches to see my father splendidly entombed beneath a white marble effigy in Thetford Priory. I could claim that grief left me ill-equipped to be a comfort to my daughter, but we all know I would be lying. Even if there had been naught a drop of sorrow in my soul, the scene would have been played out exactly the same.

  As I stood in the royal chapel, so gracious and elegant in my gold-edged amber velvet, gold chains, and ropes of pearls, the perfect portrait of an elegant and poised wife, Thomas Bullen’s prized and pedigreed trophy, beside my dour, dark-clad husband, who, like His Majesty, placed all the blame and burden on Mary’s shoulders, I looked at my eldest daughter and thought, There but for the Grace of God go I, and thanked Our Heavenly Father with all my heart for giving me the strength and stubbornness to resist King Henry’s advances.

  Yes, I also condemned Mary. I had dreamed of a golden future for my golden girl; she was so beautiful I wanted her to have the best of everything, a life worthy of her; one doesn’t after all take the finest diamond and set it in brass or tin. I blamed her for failing to make the dreams that I had dreamed for her come true.

  Mary’s glittering career was finished. She was Will Carey’s responsibility now, Thomas said, not ours, and we, her family, I am ashamed to say, all washed our hands of her. I would never be there for Mary as a mother should, when her daughter is hurt, heartsore, and has need of her, even if it is only for the comforting balm of an embrace or a few kind and tender words, all the things she had expected from me when she ran to me that fateful night. In this way, I failed her grievously and always would. I should have stood up for her, spoken out on her behalf, and always, always stood by her, but I did not.

  Later, I would plead a headache and leave the wedding banquet, and go velvet-cloaked upon soft soles to Remi and in his arms rejoice all the more that I had not gone the way of my daughter. Even though I, being made of sterner stuff, would have succeeded where she had failed, I would not have been in her shoes for a kingdom.

  “I’m so glad that wasn’t me!” I cried as I lay sweaty and spent in my beloved’s arms.

  But I didn’t want to talk about it. When he started to speak, I silenced him by pressing my mouth hard over his for more insistent and ardent kisses to divert his mind from the matter. I knew Remi would see things differently and say things I knew but did not then want to hear. All I wanted at that moment was to be held; I wanted to be loved, hard and fast, then so gently it made me cry, not debate the ways of the world we lived in and whether I was right or wrong, and if Mary had been condemned unjustly. Only now, in hindsight, when it is too late, can I give voice and due consideration to those things and admit that I was indeed wrong. I failed my daughter. I failed all my children in the worst way a mother can. I was never there, even when I was physically present. When they needed me, I always let them down.

  By this time George was also married, but not all the marigolds and rosewater in the world could save that unhappy union. It was a sinking ship from the start—the marital equivalent of a songbird sharing its gilded cage with a serpent. Lady Jane Parker, the spoiled only daughter and sole heiress of Lord Morley, was the proverbial snake in the grass, and I curse the day my son, most unwillingly, married her. Despite her rich dowry, Jane would bring nothing but pain, sorrow, and suffering to all of us.

  Indeed, as they stood together at the altar, I thought I could see shackles, heavy iron balls and chains binding them together like a pair of condemned prisoners sentenced to share a cell for the rest of their lives.

  Though to look at her one would think her a harmless, plain, mousy, little thing, with no sense of style or what was flattering to her figure, such as it was, Jane was in truth a villainous rat, sharp-toothed and plague-carrying. She was such a spiteful, jealous creature that there was neither a hope nor a prayer that they could ever find a way to live amicably together. George could not love her, and this knowledge sent Jane flying into the most violent, terrifying rages, in which she behaved like a madwoman, and cursed and blamed each and every person George ever liked or favored, even servants he smiled at and spoke a kind word to in passing; Jane would carry on until they quit or were dismissed or send them packing herself, without a reference, if it was in her power to do so. She accused everyone George showed even the smallest sign of liking of stealing away the affection that should
have been hers. Jane wanted the whole of George’s heart, and he gave her none of it. She didn’t want him to smile at anyone else but her.

  Most of all she hated Anne. Anne became the particular target of her wrath. Sometimes she spoke wildly, accusing brother and sister of being sin-drenched partners in an unnatural love affair that went against all the laws of God and Man. But George just laughed at her, right in her face. He flung up his hands and declared, “The woman is mad—stark, raving mad!” and went on his merry way, most often with Anne, which only added more fuel to the blazing bonfire of Jane’s hate.

  Instead of confronting her, trying to play the diplomat and seek a peaceful compromise, George ran from her and took his pleasures elsewhere. Though my husband often reminded him that, as his only living son, it was George’s duty to sire heirs to perpetuate the Boleyn line, George merely looked at himself in the nearest mirror, raised his wine cup high in a mocking toast, and said, “Here’s to the last Bullen boy!” and continued to shun Jane’s bed as though she were a leper and her touch would make his prick fall off. “Living with Jane,” he often said, was “pure, unadulterated Hell,” and he would not wish his wife on his worst enemy. “I don’t hate anyone that much!” he quipped, though in truth it was no jest.

  He drank, gambled, and took lovers, many lovers, both male and female. At first, I was saddened and appalled to discover that my sole surviving son dallied in the sin of Sodom, but he was my son, and I loved him, so I had to accept him as he was. And when I sat and thought about it, I found it didn’t really matter all that much. When he drank, and George often sought solace and escape in wine cups, he came to me, instead of Anne, in a mood to confide the “deepest, darkest secrets of my damned soul.” He would chuckle as he said it, but I wasn’t entirely sure he really meant it to be a jest.